The open windows of Eleanor’s bower looked out upon a bay tree, a little thing awaiting its slaughter—for shade trees might not grow too near the windows in San Francisco. It was flopping its lance-leaves against the panes; puffs of the breeze brought in a suggestion of its pungency. That magic sense, so closely united with memory—it brought back a faint impression upon her. Her very panic at this ghost of old imaginations inspired the inquiry, barbed and shafted with secret malice:
“How many really nice girls have you known in that time?”
Bertram, sitting in considerable comfort on the window seat, flashed his eyes across his shoulder to her.
“Oh, a few in my Senior year, not many this year. What’s a man going to do on twelve a week?” She noticed the indelicacy of this, since he spoke in the house of his employer. But the next sentence from him was even more startling:
“The last time I was in love was down in High School at Tulare. She’s married a fellow in the salt business now. I guess she was 117 pretty: anyway, her hair was the color of molasses candy. I wrote a poem to her the first day I saw her.”
“A poem?” asked Eleanor.
“You do well to ask that,” said Bertram, throwing on one of those literary phrases by which, in the midst of his plain, Anglo-Saxon speech, he was recalling that he was a university man. “It rhymed, after a fashion.”
“You don’t know how to be in love until you’re older,” he went on.
(“Even that bay scent brings up only wonder, not emotion; and I can laugh at him all the way,” she thought. Yet in this tiny triumph Eleanor was not entirely happy. The vision, a little disturbing, a little shameful, but yet sweet, was quite gone.)
“Tell me about this girl with the molasses hair. She interests me. And a lot about yourself.”